Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday May 13, 2008 @11:41AM
from the well-this-one-isn't-debian-based dept.

BrianGKUAC writes "Fedora 9 has been released as of 10 AM Eastern Time this morning. Release notes can be found here. Some of the more interesting new features include a new package management system, which can be used as an alternative to pup and pirut, known as PackageKit. This release also includes GNOME 2.22 and/or KDE 4.0.3, and Firefox 3 beta 5. Overall, there are a lot of improvements worth looking at, and the Bittorrent seeds are already feeding the release fairly effectively."

IIRC, KDE said that 4.1 will have feature parity with 3.5. 4.0 is still a work-in-progress. I do agree though, I use konsole all the time and it's rather unpleasant right now. 4.0 is also missing a bunch of other basic stuff, like dragging between the two panes (files and the folder tree) in Konqueror.

"I'm a sysadmin and use KDE all day long, with Konsole as my terminal. I tried the preview release of Fedora 9 and foundthat the new Konsole - has less features!"

They must be going for the Gnome look...

All kidding aside, I'm very surprised they went with KDE4. I've been playing around with it on Gentoo for several months now, and I could understand making it an option, but to not provide KDE3 out of the box at all (http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f9/en_US/sn-Desktop.html#sn-KDE [fedoraproject.org]) is shocking. I thought even the KDE folks were recommending waiting until 4.1. Oh well, Fedora always likes the latest and greatest.

I'm surprised they didn't offer both as an option. Mandriva 2008.1 has KDE3 by default, and an optional KDE4 install. You can install both, and select which one you want from the login screen. It's way too early to force KDE4 on everyone. A lot of features are still missing, and it's still pretty unstable. For the Record Mandriva 2009, plans to be KDE4 only. Hopefully KDE4 will be more mature by then.

One thing which the Ubuntu and Fedora releases show is that having regularly scheduled releases does not always work out for the best. Both have shipped with a primary browser still in beta (FF3 is a big leap ahead, but it still has some issues to be shaken out), and Ubuntu will be doing long-term support for an outdated GCC version which misses out on a lot of improvements while Fedora uses a brand new.0 compiler. Seems like both projects might have had better releases a month or so later.

It still encourages a good rolling release of new packages rather than letting things stagnate. Not saying newer is always better, but things will be fixed within a few weeks and regular package releases to solve any bugs, as well as support for newer technology. This is coming from someone partial to fedora, since I've used it since core 4, and I've never really had an issue with anything, with the exception of getting my wireless card on my laptop to work, but everyone knows what a bitch that is to solve. Desktop, however, has never had an issue.In the other corner we have XP which I will refuse to update with SP3. SP2 forced me to do a fresh install, so I won't bother with it until I really need to.